Cisco is sick of the state of patent licensing for video codecs, so has decided to set a royalty-free of its own loose on the world.
The Borg's problem is twofold: on the one hand, the licensing pools for H.264 fail to represent many of the participants in the industry; on the other, the successor, H.265, can be vastly more …

Took me a while to work out

Re: Took me a while to work out

>>which are not knowingly patent encumbered. Why do we need another one?

You answered your own question. The current group of free codecs, are not knowingly patent encumbered, because they haven't been given the once over by lawyers, because they usually can't afford any. The chances are, like many free softwares, they tend to use patented stuff, but until they become mainstream enough harm profits and get noticed by the lawyers for patentors, they continue in ignorant bliss.